First published 2020
O'Toole examines the forces that drove Britain's Brexit vote by tracing how media fabrications became national obsessions. He reveals how political elites embraced indifference to truth and historical fact as their defining characteristic. The author shows how a former colonial power reimagined itself as an oppressed nation seeking liberation. O'Toole connects seemingly trivial details like prawn cocktail flavored chips to Boris Johnson's political rise, while exposing the deregulation fantasies that motivated figures like Arron Banks, Nigel Farage, and Jacob Rees-Mogg. He identifies the quiet emergence of English nationalism, a force too timid to declare its own name. The book challenges Britain's fatal attraction to heroic failure, a self-critical cult of a successful empire that could afford occasional disasters from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Franklin's lost Arctic expedition. O'Toole argues that failure has lost its heroic quality, with Brexit's devastating costs falling on its most vulnerable supporters and those facing a hard Irish border.
Genres: history, political-science, non-fiction, 21st-century, current-affairs, academic
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Britain, Ireland
Period: 21st-century
224 pages · Paperback · Capitán Swing